The "Goldfish" Part 17

"Terrible burden of money!" I repeated. What did he mean?

"The weight of it--that's bowing people down and choking them up. It's like a ball and chain. I meant I wouldn't change places with any man in the millionaire cla.s.s--I couldn't stand the complexities and responsibilities. I believe the time is coming when no citizen will be permitted to receive an income from his inherited or acc.u.mulated possessions greater than is good for him. You may say that's the wildest sort of socialism. Perhaps it is. But it's socialism looked at from a different angle from the platform orators--the angle of the individual.

"I don't believe a man's money should be taken away from him and distributed round for the sake of other people--but for the protection of the man himself. There's got to be a pecuniary safety valve. Every dollar over a certain amount, just like every extra pound of steam in a boiler, is a thing of danger. We want health in the individual and in the state--not disease.

"Let the amount of a man's income be five, ten, fifteen or twenty thousand dollars--the exact figure doesn't matter; but there is a limit at which wealth becomes a drag and a detriment instead of a benefit! I'd base the legality of a confiscatory income tax on the const.i.tutionality of any health regulation or police ordinance. People shouldn't be permitted to injure themselves--or have poison lying round. Certainly it's a lesson that history teaches on every page.

"Besides everybody needs something to work for--to keep him fit--at least that's the way it looks to me. Nations--let alone mere individuals--have simply gone to seed, died of dry rot because they no longer had any stimulus. A fellow has got to have some idea in the back of his head as to what he's after--and the harder it is for him to get it, the better, as a rule, it is for him. Good luck is the worst enemy a heap of people have. Misfortune spurs a man on, tries him out and develops him--makes him more human."

"Ever played in hard luck?" I queried.

"I? Sure, I have," answered Hastings cheerfully. "And I wouldn't worry much if it came my way again. I could manage to get along pretty comfortably on less than half I've got. I like my home; but we could be happy anywhere so long as we had ourselves and our health and a few books. However, I wasn't thinking of myself. I've got a friend in the brokering business who says it's the millionaires that do most of the worrying anyhow. Naturally a man with a pile of money has to look after it; but what puzzles me is why anybody should want it in the first place."

He searched along a well-filled and disordered shelf of shabby books.

"Here's what William James says about it:

"'We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant--the liberation from material attachments; the unbribed soul; the manlier indifference; the paying our way by what we are or do, and not by what we have; the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in short the moral fighting shape.... It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated cla.s.s is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.'"

"I guess he's about right," I agreed.

"That's my idea exactly," answered Hastings. "As I look at it the curse of most of the people living on Fifth Avenue is that they're perfectly safe. You could take away nine-tenths of what they've got and they'd still have about a hundred times more money than they needed to be comfortable. They're like a whole lot of fat animals in an inclosure--they're fed three or four times a day, but the wire fence that protects them from harm deprives them of any real liberty. Or they're like goldfish swimming round and round in a big bowl. They can look through sort of dimly; but they can't get out! If they really knew, they'd trade their security for their freedom any time.

"Perfect safety isn't an unmixed blessing by any means. Look at the photographs of the wild Indians--the ones that carried their lives in their hands every minute--and there's something stern and n.o.ble about their faces. Put an Indian on a reservation and he takes to drinking whisky. It was the same way with the chaps that lived in the Middle Ages and had to wear shirts of chainmail. It kept 'em guessing. That's merely one phase of it.

"The real thing to put the bite into life is having a Cause. People forget how to make sacrifices--or become afraid to. After all, even dying isn't such a tremendous trick. Plenty of people have done it just for an idea--wanted to pray in their own way. But this modern way of living takes all the sap out of folks. They get an entirely false impression of the relative values of things. It takes a failure or a death in the family to wake them up to the comparative triviality of the worth of money as compared, for instance, to human affection--any of the real things of life.

"I don't object to inequality of mere wealth in itself, because I wouldn't dignify money to that extent. Of course I do object to a situation where the rich man can buy life and health for his sick child and the poor man can't. Too many sick babies! That'll be attended to, all right, in time. I wouldn't take away one man's money for the sake of giving it to others--not a bit of it. But what I would do would be to put it out of a man's power to poison himself with money.

"Suicide is made a crime under the law. How about moral and intellectual suicide? It ought to be prevented for the sake of the state. No citizen should be allowed to stultify himself with luxury any more than he should be permitted to cut off his right hand. Excuse me for being didactic--but you said you'd like to get my point of view and I've tried to give it to you in a disjointed sort of way. I'd sooner my son would have to work for his living than not, and I'd rather he'd spend his life contending with the forces of nature and developing the country than in quarreling over the division of profits that other men had earned."

I had listened attentively to what Hastings had to say; and, though I did not agree with all of it, I was forced to admit the truth of a large part. He certainly seemed to have come nearer to solving the problem than I had even been able to. Yet it appeared to my conservative mind shockingly socialistic and chimerical.

"So you really think," I retorted, "that the state ought to pa.s.s laws which should prevent the acc.u.mulation--or at least the retention--of large fortunes?"

Hastings smiled apologetically.

"Well," he answered, "I don't know just how far I should advocate active governmental interference, though it's a serious question. You're a thousand times better qualified to express an opinion on that than I am.

"When I spoke about health and police regulations I was talking metaphorically. I suppose my real idea is that the moral force of the community--public opinion--ought to be strong enough to compel a man to live so that such laws would be unnecessary. His own public spirit, his conscience, or whatever you call it, should influence him to use whatever he has above a certain amount for the common good--to turn it back where he got it, or somebody else got it, instead of demoralizing the whole country and setting an example of waste and extravagance. That kind of thing does an awful lot of harm. I see it all round me. But, of course, the worst sufferer is the man himself, and his own good sense ought to jack him up.

"Still you can't force people to keep healthy. If a man is bound to sacrifice everything for money and make himself sick with it, perhaps he ought to be prevented."

"Jim!" cried Mrs. Hastings, coming in with a pitcher of cider and some gla.s.ses. "I could hear you talking all the way out in the kitchen. I'm sure you've bored our guest to death. Why, the chestnuts are burned to a crisp!"

"He hasn't bored me a bit," I answered; "in fact we are agreed on a great many things. However, after I've had a gla.s.s of that cider I must start back to town."

"We'd love to have you spend the night," she urged. "We've a nice little guestroom over the library."

The invitation was tempting, but I wanted to get away and think. Also it was my duty to look in on the bridge party before it became too sleepy to recognize my presence. I drank my cider, bade my hostess good night and walked to the station with Hastings. As we crossed the square to the train he said:

"It was mighty good of you to come out here to see us and we both appreciate it. Hope you'll forgive my bluntness this morning and for shooting off my mouth so much this evening."

"My dear fellow," I returned, "that was what I came out for. You've given me something to think about. I'm thinking already. You're quite right. You'd be a fool to change places with anybody--let alone a miserable millionaire."

In the smoker of the accommodation, to which I retired, I sat oblivious of my surroundings until we entered the tunnel. So far as I could see, Hastings had it on me at every turn--at thirty-three hundred a year--considerably less than half of what I paid out annually in servants' wages. And the exasperating part of it all was that, though I spent seventy-two thousand a year, I did not begin to be as happy as he was! Not by a jugful. Face to face with the simple comfort of the cottage I had just left, its sincerity and affection, its thrifty self-respect, its wide interests, I confessed that I had not been myself genuinely contented since I left my mother's house for college, thirty odd years before. I had become the willing victim of a materialistic society.

I had squandered my life in a vain effort to purchase happiness with money--an utter impossibility, as I now only too plainly saw. I was poisoned with it, as Hastings had said--sick _with_ it and _sick of_ it.

I was one of Hastings' chaingangs of prosperous prisoners--millionaires shackled together and walking in lockstep; one of his school of goldfish b.u.mping their noses against the gla.s.s of the bowl in which they were confined by virtue of their inability to live outside the medium to which they were accustomed.

I was through with it! From that moment I resolved to become a free man; living my own life; finding happiness in things that were worth while. I would chuck the whole nauseating business of valets and scented baths; of c.o.c.ktails, clubs and cards; of an unwieldy and tiresome household of lazy servants; of the ennui of heavy dinners; and of a family the members of which were strangers to each other. I could and would easily cut down my expenditures to not more than thirty thousand a year; and with the balance of my income I would look after some of those sick babies Hastings had mentioned.

I would begin by taking a much smaller house and letting half the servants go, including my French cook. I had for a long time realized that we all ate too much. I would give up one of my motors and entertain more simply. We would omit the spring dash to Paris, and I would insist on a certain number of evenings each week which the family should spend together, reading aloud or talking over their various plans and interests. It did not seem by any means impossible in the prospect and I got a considerable amount of satisfaction from planning it all out. My life was to be that of a sort of glorified Hastings. After my healthy, peaceful day in the quiet country I felt quite light-hearted--as nearly happy as I could remember having been for years.

It was raining when I got out at the Grand Central Station, and as I hurried along the platform to get a taxi I overtook an acquaintance of mine--a social climber. He gave me a queer look in response to my greeting and I remembered that I had on the old gray hat I had taken from the quick lunch.

"I've been off for a tramp in the country," I explained, resenting my own instinctive embarra.s.sment.

"Ah! Don't say! Didn't know you went in for that sort of thing! Well, good night!"

He sprang into the only remaining taxi without asking me to share it and vanished in a cloud of gasoline smoke. I was in no mood for waiting; besides I was going to be democratic. I took a surface car up Lexington Avenue and stood between the distended knees of a fat and somnolent Italian gentleman for thirty blocks. The car was intolerably stuffy and smelled strongly of wet umbrellas and garlic. By the time I reached the cross-street on which I lived it had begun to pour. I turned up my coat collar and ran to my house.

Somehow I felt like a small boy as I threw myself panting inside my own marble portal. My butler expressed great sympathy for my condition and smuggled me quickly upstairs. I fancy he suspected there was something discreditable about my absence. A pungent aroma floated up from the drawing room, where the bridge players were steadily at work. I confess to feeling rather dirty, wet and disreputable.

"I'm sorry, sir," said my butler as he turned on the electric switch in my bedroom, "but I didn't expect you back this evening, and so I told Martin he might go out."

A wave of irritation, almost of anger, swept over me. Martin was my perfect valet.

"What the devil did you do that for!" I snapped.

Then, realizing my inconsistency, I was ashamed, utterly humiliated and disgusted with myself. This, then, was all that my resolution amounted to after all!

"I am very sorry, sir," repeated my butler. "Very sorry, sir, indeed.

Shall I help you off with your things?"

"Oh, that's all right!" I exclaimed, somewhat to his surprise. "Don't bother about me. I'll take care of myself."

"Can't I bring you something?" he asked solicitously.

"No, thanks!" said I. "I don't need anything that you can give me!"

"Very good, sir," he replied. "Good night, sir."

"Good night," I answered, and he closed the door noiselessly.

I lit a cigarette and, tossing off my coat, sank into a chair. My mere return to that ordered elegance seemed to have benumbed my individuality. Downstairs thirty of our most intimate friends were amusing themselves at the cardtables, confident that at eleven-thirty they would be served with supper consisting of salads, ice-cream and champagne. They would not hope in vain. If they did not get it--speaking broadly--they would not come again. They wanted us as we were--house, food, trappings--the whole layout. They meant well enough. They simply had to have certain things. If we changed our scale of living we should lose the acquaintance of these people, and we should have n.o.body in their place.